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Chapter 1 Hostile environment: London’s racial geography, 1960–80 This chapter charts the processes through which space became racialised in London between the 1950s and the 1980s and the emergence of specific forms of musical space, the reggae sound system1 and the soul club, which flowed into and were reconfigured in the club cultures of London in the mid-1980s. It asks and tries to answer a series of questions. How was public space racialised in the post-war period? How was leisure patterned by race? How did it happen that those coded as non-white and
What can culture, and its manifestations in artistic and creative forms, ‘do’?
Creativity and resistance draws on original collaborative research that brings
together a range of stories and perspectives on the role of creativity and
resistance in a hostile environment. In times of racial nationalism across the
world, it seeks to connect, in a grounded way, how creative acts have agitated
for social change. The book suggests that creative actions themselves, and
acting together creatively, can at the same time offer vital sources of
hope.
Drawing on a series of case studies, Creativity and resistance focuses
on the past and emergent grassroots arts work that has responded to migration,
racism and social exclusion across several contexts and locations, including
England, Northern Ireland and India. The book makes a timely intervention,
foregrounding the value of creativity for those who are commonly marginalised
from centres of power, including from the mainstream cultural industries.
Bringing together academic research with individual and group experiences, the
authors also consider the possibilities and limitations of collaborative
research projects.
Given its significance in the history of Britain as the pioneer city of the industrial revolution, it is surprising that until the 1990s there was little academic research on the Manchester Irish. This book examines the development of the Irish community in Manchester, one of the most dynamic cities of nineteenth-century Britain. It examines the process by which the Irish came to be blamed for all the ills of the Industrial Revolution and the ways in which they attempted to cope with a sometimes actively hostile environment. The book first traces the gradual development of links between Manchester and Ireland, largely through the build-up of commercial connections, but also noting the two-way movement of people across the Irish Sea. Then, it focuses on Angel Meadow, discussing the rapid build-up of the resident Irish population and the spatial distribution of the Irish in the network of streets. An account on the significance of the Catholic Church for the migrant Irish follows. The book also examines the evolution St Patrick's Day. Next, it discusses how Manchester's Irish related to the broader political concerns of the city during the period from the 1790s to the 1850s whilst retaining a keen interest in Irish affairs. The role of the Irish in the electoral politics of the city from the 1870s onwards is subsequently examined. After an analyses on the evolution of the commemoration rituals for the Manchester Martyrs, the book attempts to trace the hidden history of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) in Manchester.
international staff deployed in crisis situations, making security incidents more likely purely for statistical reasons. At the same time, the aid sector has seen a marked increase in concern for staff security and organisations’ own ‘duty of care’ to ensure it. The increased risks, both real and perceived, have led the sector to devote more resources to the development of security guidance, pre-deployment training (commonly known as hostile environment awareness training, or HEAT
This became known as the Windrush scandal. The scandal is connected to the ‘hostile environment’, which is the name for a set of anti-immigration policies introduced by the then Home Secretary Theresa May to lower immigration by making the (prospective) lives of migrants miserable, costly, and precarious. As well as a hostile environment, these changes to healthcare represent nationalisation of the NHS – not in terms of state ownership, but in the definition that this book focuses on: making the state more national, especially in its regulation
cultural terms, an essential ‘common sense’ understanding of the nation as white remains and is still reflected in the politics of migration today. The ‘hostile environment’ policy introduced by the Home Secretary, Theresa May, under the coalition government, which came into effect in 2012, was not specifically aimed at people of colour. It had a disproportionate impact on people of colour, however, as revealed by the Windrush scandal, because by the racial logic of the white nation, it was disproportionately people of
How can we maintain hope for a more equal world? In this chapter we outline the theory and practice that undergirded our solidarity in the project. The chapter contains some of the readings, the references, the routes, that we all brought to the project to understand how creative forms of resistance have responded to hostile environments, and why. We begin by revisiting bell hooks’ work on ‘radical openness’, not to be confused with the United Nations’ adoption of radical openness as a template for transparent working and resilience. Indeed
practices linked to the War on Terror. Whilst the militarisation and securitisation of the War on Terror and the hostile environment have expanded authoritarian governance through tactics such as deprivation (alongside deportation, passport removals and assassination), I show how deprivation is attuned to both the orientation and management of racial categories of empire and contemporary imperial formations. Against much of the contemporary work on citizenship deprivation, which argues that deprivation is an ‘exceptional’ aberration of citizenship (Joppke 2016; Choudhury
where there is despair, representation where there is none. While we have been interested in creating a space to hear stories and direct testimonies deriving from people's real, lived experiences, it is clear that these emerge out of forms of hostility that render experiences of race-based and other forms of prejudice as always more than a matter of personal, subjective experience. These are not isolated stories, and structural inequalities and hostile environments have real, material consequences. In the UK, Brexit has brought the politics of the
day, her mother’s dream to see her daughter adorned in the bride’s seven outfits was shattered, as were the dreams of the two little orphans, transplanted from their tranquil bled to the grey sky of Ivry. Building a new identity in a completely different, and often hostile, environment constitutes an arduous task for the protagonist, who realizes that she is responsible not only for her own destiny, but also for those of her younger brother and father. This provides a triple challenge for the protagonist, who shares her worries in a simple, touching confession